An economics think tank argues parasocial relationships are just imaginary friends for adults
AEI, on Farrah Fawcett posters in 1976. It is the least sympathetic framing of the week and the most useful one.
American Enterprise InstituteRead →
Taylor Swift's re-recordings are a parasocial business model
ABC Triple J on why owning your back catalogue is a relationship with an audience, not just an artist decision.
Every other artist is watching this and copying the tactic without copying the thing that made it work, which is a decade of being unusually specific about who she was talking to. The re-records are legal housekeeping. The actual product is a fanbase that has been told, gently, for years, what it is. Closeness you did not have to manufacture is the only kind anybody has ever paid for.
Notice, name, choose. That's the whole method.
The clerk's shelf - how this got here first
NOVEL
Company Dreamer ↗The #1 dreamer in the world has her life rearranged to keep her end-dream in the black.Sources
Parasocial relationships are becoming very valuable in music, and Taylor Swift knows it ↗
ABC Triple J · 25 SEP 2026
Where this sits in the encyclopedia
The K-pop intimacy economyIdol apps, paid messaging, fan-owned content, fan-voted releases, anniversary features, and a fandom documented and researched as a business model.The reality celebrityA person famous for being filmed, with no skill, no work and no release schedule - and an audience that formed anyway.Paid intimacyPaid message apps where a window shaped exactly like the one holding your best friend costs about four dollars a month per artist, plus anniversary…The residencyA single artist booking a stadium for many consecutive nights, generating a physical economy around one very large parasocial bond.The failing endorsementEvidence that the value of a celebrity endorsement falls when the audience suspects the relationship is a transaction.Envy, relief, and the two feelings at onceEnvy of the object of the attachment and simultaneous relief that it is not actually being withheld from you - the emotional ambivalence that is…
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